“The Eye Has to Travel”: Diana Vreeland continues to reign in red

“Red is the great clarifier – bright, cleansing, revealing. It makes all colors beautiful. I can’t imagine being bored with it – it would be like becoming tired of the person you love. I wanted this apartment to be a garden – but it had to be a garden in hell.”

– Diana Vreeland

How do you begin to tell the story of an icon like Diana Vreeland? In a career that spanned six decades she brought a new kind of imagination and wit to the magazine world during her years as Fashion Editor at Harper’s Bazaar and Editor-in-Chief at Vogue. When her career at Vogue came to a conclusion she had an incredible third act as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute where she redefined fashion exhibitions and turned an under-the-radar department at the Museum into a blockbuster phenomenon with a spring gala that remains the event of the New York season. Then there’s the story that during her interwar years as a proprietress of a luxury lingerie shop in London she sold Wallis Simpson the negligees that caused the abdication crisis and changed history. “Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel,” Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s documentary film opening September 21 in New York and Los Angeles and September 28 in San Francisco, is a fitting tribute to the many lives of the immortal D.V.

Diana Vreeland shot by Richard Avedon, for Harper's Bazaar in 1946.

Immordino Vreeland, the wife of Vreeland’s grandson, Alexander, has created a stand out fashion documentary in a season where there are many to choose from (“Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston,” “Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s” and“Versailles ’73: American Runway Revolution”to name just a few). I was lucky enough to catch a special showing of the film at the San Francisco Film Festival this past spring and, as a longtime Vreeland fan, was mesmerized by the encompassing and irreverent portrait.

“I fell in love with Diana Vreeland as a young college student, mesmerized by her pages in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue,” says Immordino Vreeland, who also authored as companion book to the documentary. “I later fell in love with her grandson and became a member of the Vreeland family. Although I never got to meet Mrs. Vreeland, I became fully immersed in her world.”

The film chronicles Vreeland’s life from her birth in Belle Epoque Paris (“The first thing to do is to arrange to be born in Paris. After that, everything follows quite naturally.” she famously stated in her 1984 memoir,D.V.) to the Cafe Society of the 1930s and beyond to her careers at Bazaar, Vogue and the Met. Utilizing interviews with family, friends, colleagues and, most of all, footage of Vreeland speaking in that famous staccato almost baritone purr you get a picture of the woman and the legend.

Diana Vreeland photographed by Jonathan Becker

Her edicts were legendary and remain quotable.

On color: “Shocking pink is the navy blue of India.”

On taste: “I’m a great believer in vulgarity- if it’s got vitality. A little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika.”

On Balenciaga: “His clothes were devastating. One fainted. One simply blew up and died.”

Like any document about Vreeland, celebration of fashion is in abundance. Images from her Bazaar, Vogue and Met days remain enthralling, outre and even contemporary. Vreeland discovered and promoted some of the greatest fashion talents of the 20th century and their presence is felt throughout the film. Richard Avedon, Halston, Valentino, Lauren Bacall models Veruschka, Twiggy, Marisa Berenson, and even a young Andre Leon Talley were all part of the Vreeland stable. Like Vreeland herself, the documentary is first and foremost concerned with telling a good story.

What a story it is. Vreeland never did anything halfway. At Vogue she ran the first ever bikini fashion spread in an American magazine. At the Met, she didn’t just create exhibitions, she was determined to create worlds by piping in music (a novelty) and perfume into the Costume Institute galleries. Her autobiography wasn’t just another fashion memoir, it was a bestseller and remains a cult favorite among fashionistas for her hyperbolic descriptions of the collections and her (sometimes apocryphal but always charming) stories about the bygone jet set era. “The Eye Has to Travel” is a celebration of these many accomplishments and the woman behind them. Although the filmmaker never met Diana Vreeland, she absolutely knows her and by the end of the film, so do we.